A single English word with several jobs
In current English, time names the measurable stretch of an action, the irreversible line from past through present to future, a clock reading, an occasion, a lifetime, leisure, an era, and, in the plural, a multiplier. You can ask what time it is, speak of hard times, keep time in music, or do time in prison. That load is heavy for one noun. French keeps duration, occurrence, and the clock hour in different words. German likewise splits the continuum from a counted instance and uses a separate word for the hour. English did not.
Inherited, not borrowed
The origin of the word time is native. Old English already had the masculine n-stem tima, used for a limited span: a period, a season, a lifetime, a fixed hour, a favorable moment, an opportunity. First attestation belongs to the Old English period, before 1150. Middle English continued it as tyme or time. Nothing in that line is a loan from Latin or French. The noun comes down through Proto-West Germanic and Proto-Germanic as an inherited Germanic form.
Early Middle English did not always prefer this word. Another native noun, sith, covered a turn or occasion, and learned or bilingual writers had Latin tempus and Old French temps in sight. The Middle English Dictionary suggests that the later dominance of time may have been helped by that Romance vocabulary even though the English form itself stayed Germanic. The resemblance to tempus is accidental. Latin tempus is a different family; English time is not a clipped descendant of it.
A portion cut from a larger flow
Comparativists reconstruct Proto-Germanic *timo as an n-stem. Behind it they place a Proto-Indo-European formation with a suffix of the -mon type on a root meaning to divide or share out. Older handbooks write that root as *da-; newer ones as *deh2- or the extended *deh2y-. On this analysis the oldest sense is not an endless medium but an allotted slice: a share of duration marked off from the rest.
That reconstruction also explains the nearest English relative, tide. Tide continues a different derivative of the same root, Proto-Germanic *tidiz, the source of German Zeit, Dutch tijd, and Icelandic tid. In early English the pair time and tide were near-synonyms for occasion or season. Only later did tide specialize toward the sea, while time kept the general work. The morphology is transparent once the two suffixes are seen: one root, two nouns, no folk story required.
North Germanic kept the time-word as a daily unit. Old Norse timi meant time or the proper moment. Modern Swedish timme and Danish and Norwegian time mean an hour, and in Danish and Norwegian often a lesson as well. Icelandic timi still covers time and season. Scots tyme is the same inheritance. Standard High German largely dropped this noun; an Alemannic remnant survives. When a German speaker says Zeit, the cousin in English is tide, not time.
A farther equation is widely cited and still slightly open. Some etymologists, among them Kroonen, treat Ancient Greek daimon, originally a divider or allotter, as built on the same stem, which would make English time and Greek daemon distant doublets. The exact Proto-Indo-European shape is written differently across handbooks (*di-mon-, *dh2i-mon-, *deh2imo). The Greek link is a serious proposal, not a closed demonstration, and it should be left marked as such.
From a bounded span to an open continuum
Old English tima was already versatile. Beside duration it could mean the hour, the appointed season, a chance, the condition of an age, and, in grammatical teaching, the quantity of a syllable. What the early record does not yet show clearly is time as an unbounded continuum that simply goes on, independent of any particular event.
That more abstract reading is in place by the late fourteenth century. Around the same stretch of Middle English the noun is used for one of a series of occasions, as in how many times, and by the late 1300s for multiplication. Leisure, the right moment, and a person's lifetime are older shades that never left. Later centuries added the clock reading as a default sense, the character of an age (the times), the length of a prison sentence, closing hour in a public house, musical meter, and a family of verbs. The verb begins in Old English getimian, to happen or befall. By about 1300 it can mean to appoint a moment; by the 1660s, to measure the duration of a race or process.
Personification as an aged figure with scythe and hourglass is a Renaissance overlay. Science-fiction travel through time is later still. Those images did not create the noun. They stretched a Germanic word whose first job was to name a bounded share of happening.
The Scandinavian hour
Swedish timme is a useful leftover. The northern cognate narrowed toward the hour, the most familiar divided unit of the day. English went the other way and let time name the whole medium, the clock point, and the counted instance. The older idea is still visible in the family: a portion marked off, a sibling of tide, and no Latin twin at the root.